Vanguard are a enemy introduced to break up combat and add another factor to consider. However due to their un-interactive nature they completely fail at this and only server as a mild annoyance that eats slightly too many hits to be reasonable. There is no counterplay to them and I feel like this is a extremely missed opportunity.
The way they are designed punishes you for breaking their shield, if you break their shield they become effectively stagger immune. This would be fair if there was a way to deal with them without breaking their shield. I think the simplest solution to this is to make them take 4x damage and stagger in their animation after being blocked. Making most weapons able to one shot them in the head, and making it possible to push them over with all pushes. If we want to be more strict maybe this only happens after a perfect block.
Doing this allows players to actually play around them rather then just spamming light attacks until the problem goes away. You would be able to easily and effectively remove them as long as you engage in their counterplay. Either by blocking and then counter attacking for a instant kill with most weapons, or if they are in a larger hoard and you cannot get the last headshot on them, push the hoard after blocking their attack, knocking over the vanguards to temporarily remove them from play.
What a enemy with actual fair counterplay looks like:
(And not needing to do that like 4 times like you do in the actual game)
the fix is simple very simple compare them to the same type of enemy from vermintide 2 and now ask your self why the darktide version has 20X the HP and 20X shield HP and and why its so freaking hard to just stagger them…
this fix is simple they need to have the same HP as a scab ranger or flak armor scab walker shield needs to break in maybe 3-5 hits max and you need to be able to push them…
to make it worse they survive 2 brains burst’s a brain burst takes lets say around 35% HP away from them you need to brain burst them 3 times just to kill a single 1…
you see the problem everything about this enemy is a problem everything
The thing is if they had less health they would just instantly die. I understand why they made them this way, combat in darktide is not the same as in vermintide at all, I mean there are like 10x the amount of enemies on screen in darktide and our weapons are balanced around dealing with that. If they could easily be killed by just spamming light attacks then no one would even notice they exist.
Finally, someone understands it! There’s a reason why we have to fight 20-25 Scab Bruisers and not 5 of them, unlike with Marauders from Vermintide 2.
I think most of these ideas would also work. But I think needing to actually play around the enemies’ shield is good. It doesn’t make stagger weapons any worse, the idea still works with them just instead of killing them with one headshot you are knocking them over, still effectively removing them from the fight and you can mop them up afterwards. I just think getting rewarded for paying attention to them would be good.
Its benefitting all weapons equally. Its just making you need to pay attention to them and block their attacks to open them up instead of just going unga bunga until they fall over.